A great deal is written for and about HR’s agenda in the “post recession” economy and world. Everyone has an opinion. To be honest, sometimes it’s a little tiring.

Because I try to stay on top of the key issues facing organizations and the management of their talent to achieve business success, I read all the reports. So when I ran across yet another report titled Human Capital Trends 2012, I steeled myself for another rote discussion of becoming strategic, immersing the function in social media, yada, yada, yada.

Imagine my delight, when I started reading and found an actually interesting and useful report from Deloitte. Really. Download it here and read it.

There are several additional trends called out and discussed, but I found the treatment of these particularly useful.

The discussion of the ability of workforce reporting and analytics to help make better, more informed decisions about people was easily understandable — for once. For instance, I think the chart below is one of the most easily understood diagrams of how tactical reporting can lead into predictive analytics. By breaking it down into three categories even emerging HR professionals can grasp the concept and context of predictive analytics:

What is happening?

Why is it happening?

What might be happening?

As far as maturity models go, this one is a winner!

I think you’ll enjoy the entire report. It’s full of high level trends that all HR professionals will recognize as well as practical approaches to combat, overcome or exploit them. Get a cup of coffee, your highlighter, and check out this report.